Karoo

by Steve Tesich

  I had, it’s true, been involved in the ruin of other films in the past, but they were all of a different kind. All of them, in one way or another, had been compromised in their very conception, before I ever got to them. The very best of these films, that young man’s film in Pittsburgh, for example, had as their goal a certain level of commercial competence, and although my involvement lowered that level a notch or two, it did not deprive the world of any great work of art.

  Arthur Houseman’s film was something else. It was a masterpiece. It called upon the best in me just to be able to appreciate it properly, and even in that regard I felt a little inadequate. I was a hack, but I was not a vandal. I could as easily go to the Art Institute in Chicago and attack my favorite Van Gogh there with a butcher knife as be responsible for even the slightest change in the film I had seen. For once, I was protected from my own moody and unreliable nature by the artistic integrity of the work itself.

  All Cromwell was doing was paying for my little getaway from New York. Although I knew that he could afford it, that the costs I would incur were negligible to somebody of his resources, it still pleased me that for once I was getting something from him in return for nothing.

  5

  Having unpacked, I uncorked his bottle of champagne.

  A faint hope lurked in my mind that perhaps my inability to get drunk was a regional disease, confined to the East Coast. Perhaps here in LA, where I hadn’t been since the onset of my drunk disease, things would be different.

  I drank until both bottles of champagne were empty, only to reconfirm yet again that my mind was a fortress impervious to alcohol.

  On the positive side, however, my drinking did use up time. It was now almost two hours later than when I began. Almost midnight. Time, even by LA time, to call it a night.

  I lay in a bed that was large enough to be a small island. I lay waiting for sleep. Friday was over, but the remainder of the LA weekend loomed in front of me like some sea I would have to traverse.

  The motive that had brought me to LA appeared to me in all its absurdity.

  What in the world was I doing here?

  Loneliness, like leaking gas, began to seep into the darkness of my suite.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1

  I WOKE UP the next morning feeling better, cured of something or infected with something else, it was hard to tell which, but definitely in a better mood.

  I took a long shower. I shaved. I called room service and ordered breakfast. I thanked the Asian boy who brought it and overtipped him. I thanked and overtipped the Latino boy who took the dirty dishes away. I lit a fresh cigarette and picked up the phone.

  Dialing Leila’s number on the touch-tone phone felt like typing. I had no intention of talking to her. All I wanted to do was to hear her voice and then hang up.

  Her line was busy.

  It was still busy five minutes later.

  It was still busy when I called her again from the poolside. But the mere repetition of dialing her number three different times made her seem a lot more familiar. Like somebody I now felt I had a right to call.

  The sun was shining. The sky was blue. The sound of water falling from the fountain into the pool was very soothing. There was a drought in California and the sign next to the fountain informed me that the water it used was recycled.

  I sat at my table under a huge umbrella, smoking, thinking my thoughts which, like the water in the fountain, were recycled.

  The air began to heat up, the high-noon sun to bear down. A young girl in white shorts and white blouse bearing a name tag and a bright smile approached me to inquire if I wanted to order something to eat or drink. I thanked her for asking, I thanked her as sincerely as if she had rescued my whole family from a burning building, but no, I did not wish to order anything. One of the side effects of staying in a luxurious hotel is that you wind up saying thank you so many times to so many people for so many trifles that after a while this mantra of thank-yous makes you feel grateful just for being there. It makes you feel generous in a lazy LA kind of way.

  Leila’s telephone number was written on the same piece of paper as her address, 1631 Crescent Place, Venice. I considered calling her again but then decided to do something else instead.

  2

  A young Asian boy brought my rented car from the valet parking lot and held the door open for me. I thanked him and slipped a five-dollar bill into his hand.

  It had been a long time since I drove a car and it felt wonderful to drive one again. To press the cigarette lighter. To steer with one hand and smoke with the other. To have a rearview mirror and sideview mirrors, and the wind blowing through my hair. The faster I went, the more hair I felt I had for the wind to blow through. It made me feel young to drive a car again, or at least younger, as if youth were some recreational activity that could be rented in LA.

  I started speeding as soon as I got on the San Diego Freeway. I flew past cars that were speeding themselves. I was not only breaking the speed limit, I was demolishing it. At times I was going so fast I forgot where I was and where I was headed. The speeding created a momentum of its own and the momentum created its own justification for whatever destination I had in mind.

  I still had no health insurance, but so long as I stayed in my rented car, I was fully covered. I had liability and I had comprehensive. The irony of this just added to my reckless delight. I was insured. If I happened to plow into one of my fellow motorists, the ensuing carnage would be fully covered.

  It almost came to that. A multicar collision was avoided only by the keen reflexes of the drivers around me when I swerved sharply from my far left lane to the far right lane in preparation for my exit on Venice Boulevard.

  3

  Around and around Venice I drove for almost an hour, as if caught in some whirlpool that kept spitting me out time after time back on Lincoln Avenue.

  There was a very good map of LA and its vicinity in the car, and I consulted it every time I wound up back on Lincoln Avenue.

  I had no problem at all finding her street on the map, or figuring out how to get to her street on the map. But getting there in my car was proving to be a multi-cigarette-consuming ordeal.

  I kept driving around in circles, running into streets that were one-way the wrong way, or that dead-ended without warning at tall chain-link fences, on the other side of which were warehouses or lumberyards or junkyards guarded by big, barking junkyard dogs.

  Finally, more by accident than thanks to any navigational skill on my part, I stumbled upon a small semicircle with several streets radiating from it like spokes from a broken wheel.

  One of the street signs bore the name Crescent Place.

  4

  A single, very tall palm tree stood in the middle of the semicircle.

  Not far from the palm tree was a large tree house, but a tree house in name only. It was freestanding and perched atop sturdy wooden beams. A wooden ladder, attached to the beams, led to the top.

  I could hear the laughter of children from inside the tree house as I walked past it. Judging from the different voices I detected, the place was jammed full of kids.

  Like the tree house, Crescent Place was a street in name only. Had there been no street sign there, I would have mistaken it for a sidewalk, and a narrow sidewalk at that. It was lined with old, one-story houses. Little lawns enclosed with fences. Little flower gardens in the lawns. The arm’s-length proximity of one house to another reminded me of the houseboats at the Seventy-ninth Street marina.

  The lawns, the houses, the little narrow street itself, were completely deserted. Or seemed to be. The only sound I heard was of someone hammering. And then that ceased abruptly.

  It was getting to be very hot, and a hot wind, as if channeled by the narrow street, was blowing at my back.

  I had been to Venice Beach before, several times, but I had never ventured inside Venice itself.

  A story in the magazine section of the LA Times came to mind as I shuffled along w
ith the wind at my back. It was about this man who at the turn of the century had a vision of building a Venice in the West, along the lines of the Venice in the Mediterranean Sea. It was to have everything the European city had. Canals instead of streets. Gondolas for transportation. Graceful bridges spanning the canals. His vision, however, was revised by others, until nothing remained of the original idea other than some bridges that now spanned nothing. And, of course, the name itself. Venice.

  I followed the house numbers until I came to the address I had flown from New York to find: 1631 Crescent Place.

  It looked no different from any of the other old houses I had seen. A chain-link fence. A little lawn. A little flower garden. A cluttered porch.

  The windows were wide open and a draft from within the house caused the white, gauzelike curtains to fill with the wind and expand and then, losing the wind, to contract. I stood there, watching Leila’s house inhale and exhale, watching it breathe as if it were a living thing peacefully asleep and dreaming and completely oblivious of my presence and purpose there.

  Having come here, I had no idea what to do next. My usual supply of banal opening remarks seemed inadequate for the occasion. Nor did I have a handle on what the occasion really was. Who she really was.

  Her telephone suddenly rang. I could hear it ringing through the open windows. In the hush of the street, I heard her answering machine come on.

  “I’m not at home right now, but if you leave a message I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. I promise.”

  “Leila, it’s me again. This whole thing is getting ridiculous, isn’t it? I don’t know what’s going on with us anymore. So please, at least call me and tell me so I know. That’s not too much to ask, is it? Bye.”

  Although I was standing outside her house and although the message I had heard was not very intimate, I still felt like a burglar who had rummaged through her private things. The message I had overheard put me in the category of those who open other people’s mail, and I shrank in shame from the petty indecency of it.

  But it brought to mind the much larger indecency of my motive for being there. The man who had called her, if nothing else, sounded as if he had a right to do so. I no longer felt that I did.

  Let her be, I told myself. Leave her alone. No human being has benefited by knowing you, so why add to the list? Fill your time in LA in some other way. Let her be.

  It felt so good and right to follow my own advice that as I left her house I thought of myself and my actions in the third person.

  He, being aware of his own unpredictable and unreliable nature and knowing full well that she would be better off never coming in contact with him, decided, out of nothing more than simple human decency, to leave her alone.

  5

  The air was filled with screaming, laughing, and bloodcurdling cries. What I saw when I emerged from her street was a battle scene. Little boys and girls, armed with rubber swords and squirt guns, were scrambling up the wooden ladder, brandishing their weapons like pirates and storming the tree house. The defenders inside, thrilled to be attacked, were screaming and laughing and trying to repulse the attackers with rubber swords and squirt guns of their own.

  The energy of the kids was in stark contrast to my own. Maybe it was the heat, or the normal dip in energy I experienced at this time of day, or the bottom falling out of my plans for coming to LA, but whatever it was, it was all I could do to get back to my car.

  My automatic impulse, as I sat down behind the wheel, was to reach inside the right-hand pocket of my trousers, pull out my car keys, start the engine, and drive away. But I couldn’t get myself to do that. I just sat there, and the longer I sat there the hotter I got, and the hotter I got the harder it became to do anything.

  If I had had some space-age remote control that could have fast-forwarded me to my hotel, I would have pressed the right button and transported myself there. But the thought of fishing the car keys out of my pocket, starting the car, finding my way back to Lincoln Avenue, driving back on the San Diego Freeway, in a mood different from the one that had brought me here, and then having the rest of the evening to fill up with activities of some kind, the thought of all that time I would have to fill or kill proved too daunting for me in my present state of mind.

  I checked my cigarette supply. I lit one and watched the battle of the tree house.

  It was hard to tell what the rules were of the game of war the kids were playing. The attackers climbed the ladder and, despite heavy resistance, stormed the tree house and vanished inside. Although the shouting and screaming and laughing never stopped, some arrangement must have been reached, sides were switched, and kids I had not seen until now, former defenders of the tree house, I assumed, spilled out of there like a bag of marbles and bounced down the ladder in disarray. Once on the ground, without pausing for so much as a breather, whooping and howling like wolves before a hunt, they charged up the ladder to storm the tree house they had defended only moments before. The former invaders, the defenders of the tree house now, tried to hold them off with rubber swords and squirt guns shot at point-blank range, but to no avail. The former defenders, invaders now, stormed the tree house and vanished inside. The old defenders, chased out by the new defenders, spilled down the ladder in disarray only to regroup and become barbarians, invaders once again, when they reached the ground.

  The war continued. Although I watched with interest, I eventually lost track of who had been the original defenders of the tree house and who had been the original invaders. I suspected that the combatants themselves no longer knew.

  And then a yellow taxi appeared in the right-hand corner of my windshield. It entered the semicircle on the other side of the plam tree, drove around it, and stopped at the curb, its nose pointed to the entrance of Crescent Place.

  It wasn’t so much that I had expected her to suddenly show up as that I wasn’t at all surprised when she did. As soon as I saw her, it was like a continuation of something that had already begun.

  She stepped out of the cab and stopped. When the car door started moving toward her, she gave it a swift bump with her hip and sent it flying back again. She then bent at the waist and reached inside the backseat of the cab with open arms.

  The gesture, on its own, was not necessarily maternal, but it appeared very maternal to me. A baby, I thought. A baby in a bassinet. She’s reaching inside to pick up her child.

  Instead, she backed out with two large grocery bags in her arms. They were full and, judging by the way she held them, a little too heavy for her. One of the bags had a blue hat on top of it.

  I watched her from my car in what in movie terms would be called a long shot. The easy but total concentration with which I observed her made me think that if I had been able to summon such powers of concentration in my work, I might have turned out to be more than a rewriter.

  She stepped over the curb and headed for her door. She paused once, despite the weight of the grocery bags in her arms, to watch the continuing warfare in the tree house.

  She looked at the kids spilling down the ladder while I looked at her. She thought her thoughts and I, looking at her, tried to imagine what those thoughts might be.

  6

  The kids continued their game of siege and resiege, but shortly after Leila’s departure I could tell that things were beginning to wind down. Battle fatigue was spreading through the ranks. The bloodcurdling cries of the invaders and the defiant screams of the defenders were losing some of their earlier conviction. And then it was over. They all knew it. They wandered away in little groups, in various directions, much like a disbanded army of adults might have done after a war: a little weary, a little bored, but not at all eager for the rigors of peace that they knew awaited them at home.

  7

  The shadows of the palm tree and the tree house lengthened until they intersected. The wind died down. The sun, as a presence, dipped and disappeared from my point of view, but it would not be accurate to claim that I saw it set. Shadows ga
ve way to dusk which absorbed them, the dusk to night. The moon rose slightly to the left of that solitary palm tree in the center of the semicircle.

  I was down to five cigarettes and I lit one.

  Being where I was, sitting behind the wheel of a parked car, was starting to feel much homier than being back in my suite at the Beverly Wilshire.

  A taxicab swung off the street and into the semicircle, its headlights taking a quick swipe at my windshield. It stopped not far from where the other taxi had stopped. The engine kept running, the headlights stayed on. A minute or so later, Leila appeared. She was running as if she was late for something. She shielded her eyes with her hand from the glare of the headlights and got in the cab. The cab took off.

  8

  I had felt so good about myself when, earlier in the day, I decided to leave Leila alone. The memory of that high moral ground was with me now while I followed her cab, except now the memory was being reworked to accommodate a complete repudiation of itself.

  It was, I rationalized, a very rare thing for me to feel good and moral about myself, and yet the woman who had inspired such virtuous behavior in me and in whose name I had committed both goodness and morality earlier in the day was a woman I had never met. If without even knowing her I could be inspired to such high-minded behavior, then perhaps a whole new vista of moral behavior would open up to me if I befriended her. To leave her alone, therefore, would be tantamount to turning my back on that possibility.

  I had no idea where the cab was taking her, and so none at all where I was headed in pursuing her through the streets of Venice, but pursue her I did, like a line of narrative I was in the process of writing while I drove.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1

  THE PLACE IS called the Cove. It’s a club of some kind where you can eat and drink and dance, and everyone I see is doing at least one of the above. Those not dancing are sitting at their tables and moving at least one part of their bodies, head, foot, hand, shoulder, to the downbeat.